He would reprimand and instruct. He might be cruel. He might strike her again, and lock her up in her room. Then he would come here. Ysabelle, her brain white with the lights that splashed over her eyes, formulated what she must do. “Oh Ernst – Ernst – after our last time together – I thought you loathed me. Don’t you know how women sometimes pretend – so foolish – she let me, out of pity – she let me make-believe – that she was you!”
And then, stroking him, begging him to take her, his stinking filthy body, his disgusting tongue, and worse, the rest – the rest. But Ysabelle would have it all, she would do anything. For that way, she could protect – she would even take his member, as she had heard tell a prostitute – a mad prostitute presumably – would do, take it into her mouth – and choking down her revulsion, moaning as if with joy, become his utter slave.
She would die for him, if she must.
Hāna . . .
Mireio said to Jean that she thought that bad man, Monsieur Ernst, had led Ysabelle a dance, and cast her off. No matter. If there was a pregnancy, it could be dealt with . . . Mireio was skilled. But after all the good food they had wasted on him – the devil.
Jean shrugged. None of this concerned him. A little over a hundred years before, these rich people would have been put under a honed blade. That would have settled their minds wonderfully.
Ysabelle tossed between oblivion and awareness. She thought the pillow was Hāna, because some of Hāna’s sweet scent had been left there. She thought the acid voluptuous aroma of the cherries, plucked by Mireio, or bleeding in the grass, was the sharp catch of Hāna’s personal perfume in the moments of her ecstasy.
In her fever, Ysabelle spasmed in a deathly pleasure.
When the fever broke, pale and shuddering, Ysabelle sat by the window.
The nightingale still sang. She heard it all night long, as the swelling of her leg waned with the moon.
“No rain,” said Mireio.
Seven days passed, and then, Ysabelle went to her writing table, and began to try to compose a letter to Ernst. It was to be a love letter, confessing she could not bear not to see him. That his disapproval broke her heart. He had witnessed her ultimate foolishness, kissing his sister, locked in a female fantasy that Hāna was himself. Would he forgive her, come to her? She did not want marriage, never had, but to lose his regard – it burnt her away, like the summer leaves.
As she was writing this letter, over and over, attempting to make it right, Ernst’s letter to Ysabelle arrived, along with a package, its contents also wrapped over and over, in expensive paper from the city.
“My dear Friend,” he began, “Ysabelle: I know what worry you must have endured, and as soon as the burden upon me was eased, I sat down to write to you. We both of us care for Hāna so deeply. Let me assure you at once that now the terrible insanity which overwhelmed her has been alleviated. Could you see her, as I did, two days ago, look into her face, clear of all shadow and every frightful thing, you would know, as I do, that this was for the best.
“You will understand, that morning I calmed her as well as I might. Luckily, I keep some opiates by me, for use in certain of my experiments. These rendered Hāna her first peace, and after that I was able to convey her to St Cailloux. Here my friend, Le Rue, took charge of her at once.
“She had by now awoken, and on feeling her pulse, which was so rapid, he declared immediately this was enough to inform him such a passionate heart was unnatural, and could do her only harm. He confided to me that, in the Dark Ages, she would have been supposed possessed by the Devil. But he is a man of science. The ‘Devil’ is merely in her mind, its disorder. He acted before nightfall.
“I will not describe to you the operation, the details might alarm you, and besides you would not understand it. It involves certain nerve fibres in the frontal portion of the brain. A delicate pruning away. My magnificent friend, he made the tender incision. He is adept, and although Hāna was his very first subject, the success with her has made him sanguine for the help of others.
“It was a practice in Ancient Egypt, studied by him closely. Curious to think, that when they lay Hāna in the tomb at last, she too will bear this same scar upon her forehead and her skull, as did those persons in that land of pyramids.
“Ah, Ysabelle. Dear sister. If you could see her. She is like a little child again. Everything is new to her. The flight of a bird startles, even that. She does not move from her chair. A picture of repose, her drooping head, her folded hands. Le Rue says she does not quite know me – I fear she would not know you at all. But when I ask her to smile for me, she does. She will be well cared for, there. And though I must soon be gone from this country, Le Rue will take thought for her like his own. As indeed, he does for all his charges in that place.
“A note on my gift, which accompanies this letter. You will have realized, it is her hair, which of course, for such medical attention, had to be cut off entirely. All the shining locks. It seemed to me you might value them, dear Ysabelle, as you did when you were to her her closest and most intimate friend.
“Beyond this, my kindest wishes for your continued good health and the ending of your local drought.
“Your brother, if so I may call myself:
“Ernst.”
In her diary, her Book, Ysabelle wrote, “I sent for the old man, the charcoal burner they call Doggy. Having given him some coins, he went for me to the place, which he names Wolf Valley. He was the only one I could trust. He, and his kind, keep away from the village. He has under his shirt an amulet, dried sticks twisted in a knot. Near dawn, he came back. He had said there he was an old servant, and asked for her. Expectedly, they would not let him in, but said she was in the care of Dr Le Rue, and he need have no fears. When Doggy said, as I told him to, that he hoped she was better, they laughed. He caught a glimpse of others, at some windows. Their heads were shaved. One was wrapped up tight, and seemed to have no arms. The old man was brave. They hate that place.”
Under this Ysabelle, or something, has scrawled in a running jagged line:
Heart burst stifle and drown in blood
Perhaps a curse, or a wish for self.
There are records from the asylum. One may see them, if the tactic is carried out properly. There is a note on a woman, called only by her Christian name, to “protect” her. “Hāna, the prey of uncontrollable, obscene and perverse desires, a danger to herself and others.” The operation, “The last possible resort” and “practised among the ancients”, was a “success”.
Before the final page, Ysabelle sets out for herself some instructions on how best to hang herself. The strong beam in the lower room that faces the afternoon glare of the mountains, and will hold her weight, which, she admits, is much less, as she cannot eat. Mireio and Jean will be sent away with a settlement of money, as the last page also explains. The hair, a dead thing, still with its stranded mauve ribbons that she herself had helped, that morning of the ending, to tie there, is to be strongly plaited, not as before, woven, not with silk, but some coarse twine, to make it sure. And she will be naked, lest the rigidity of her clothes impedes her.
Ysabelle understands, from her reading, that few people die quickly when hanged. They are choked and strangle. In this way, the hair will throttle her, and as she kicks and gags in instinctive physical panic, her soul will remember that it is Hāna who is killing her, as she has killed Hāna. She affirms she will wear the silver locket with Hāna’s sexual hair. She has polished the metal.
She says, as if she has forgotten it was mentioned before, and as she says again, too, on the last page, that she has heard of a goat being sacrificed to bring rain.
After that, she says the nightingale has flown away.
Then she says she has finished.
After which, there is the last page.
There are some further pages after that, blank, obviously.
Inevitably, one fills them with the mind – the presumed hanging, the woman choking and kicking, rocked violent
ly from side to side in the white vacant empty house, then only turning, slowing, still, a pendant, while the mountains and the sun stare in. After which, as it seems almost supernaturally, fire catches the house, and burns it to the ground, leaving only the puns – St Cailloux – of the lower stone floors and stone chimneys and the stone hearths, and the stone under which the book is, until the old man, maybe Doggy, fetches it out and brings it here, to me.
In a year’s time, a peasant, travelling up the lane on foot, will pause by the ruin of the house. The land by then will have been sold off, but no one, as yet, come to restore or change it. The untended cherry trees will be leafy yet, although one or two will have succumbed to the ivy, with here and there a green young fruit hard among the foliage.
The man, a stranger, will not be troubled by any stories of the region, and going into the ruin, will poke about, since sometimes, in this way, he has found useful things others have overlooked. He will find, however, nothing, and so sit down by a stone, part of one, now collapsed, chimney. He will eat his olives and bread. Then he will fall asleep, for the sun will be again very hot.
When he wakes it will be to great alarm. Across from him, in the wild grass, a small fire will have started. He must leap up to put it out, and do so quickly. For in this weather, another summer drought, fire is the fiercest enemy.
This man is canny. When once he has dealt with the danger, he will find a soreness at his chest, and looking down, where hangs the little silver cross given him as a boy, he will come to see at once what has happened, for he has heard of it before.
An hour after, in the village, he will tell his tale over his wine, and so unravel the mystery of Madame Ysabelle’s house. The truth will not make any difference to her burial place, in fact, will only consolidate her rights to holy ground, since no one has generally told the plan of suicide written in her diary.
Now they will say without compunction, that some object- a glass, or mirror, carelessly left by the departing servants – caught the harsh light from the mountains, and cast it off in a ray against the wooden wall. The concentration of this burning-glass presently sent the tinder of the drought-dry house up in a conflagration.
Most of that will be true. Not quite all. For it was no picture or glass that caused the focus of an incendiary ray, the lighting of a death pyre. It was the polished silver locket that lay pendant on the breast of Ysabelle’s hanged corpse, once she had stopped moving, once she hung quite still, a pendant herself, naked silver on a silver chain of hair, from the beam above.
I have a lock of your hair.
I cut
It from you as you slept.
I kissed you there,
Where
The scissors met.
You never noticed it had gone.
It is all I have of you,
Your hair.
Blonde spirals in
A silver locket.
NEIL GAIMAN HORROR-HOSTED the Fox Channel’s 13 Nights of Fear during the fortnight before Hallowe’en 2004 and got to introduce movies from inside a coffin. He thought it was cool.
His 2002 novel American Gods won science fiction’s Hugo Award and horror’s Bram Stoker Award, while Coraline, a dark fantasy for children which he had been writing for a decade, was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic and even managed to beat its predecessor in the awards stakes.
On the illustrated front, his first Sandman graphic novel in seven years, entitled Endless Nights, is published by DC Comics and illustrated by seven different artists; 1602 is a new alternate history mini-series from Marvel, and he has collaborated with artist Dave McKean on the children’s picture book The Wolves in the Walls.
As well as all the above, the New York Times best-selling author has somehow also found the time to make a short vampire film entitled A Short Film About John Bolton, and he has recently started writing a new novel, with the working title of Anansi Boys.
“‘Closing Time’ is set in a real place,” Gaiman reveals. “It was called the Troy Club, and I still run into people who used to drink there (including the editor of this anthology). It was written for Michael Chabon’s McSweeney’s Mammoth Book of Thrilling Tales. I asked him what genre story he’d like, and he asked for a ghost story, and since many good ghost stories are also club stories I decided to set it in one.
“I set out to write an M. R.James ghost story, and wound up having written something more like a Robert Aickman strange story.”
THERE ARE STILL CLUBS in London. Old ones, and mock-old, with elderly sofas and crackling fireplaces, newspapers, and traditions of speech or of silence, and new clubs, the Groucho and its many knock-offs, where actors and journalists go to be seen, to drink, to enjoy their glowering solitude, or even to talk. I have friends in both kinds of club, but am not myself a member of any club in London, not any more.
Years ago, half a lifetime, when I was a young journalist, I joined a club. It existed solely to take advantage of the licensing laws of the day, which forced all pubs to stop serving drinks at eleven p.m., closing time. This club, the Diogenes, was a one-room affair located above a record shop in a narrow alleyjust off the Tottenham Court Road. It was owned by a cheerful, chubby, alcohol-fuelled woman called Nora, who would tell anyone who asked and even if they didn’t that she’d called the club the Diogenes, darling, because she was still looking for an honest man. Up a narrow flight of steps, and, at Nora’s whim, the door to the club would be open, or not. It kept irregular hours.
It was a place to go once the pubs closed, that was all it ever was, and despite Nora’s doomed attempts to serve food or even to send out a cheery monthly newsletter to all her club’s members reminding them that the club now served food, that was all it would ever be. I was saddened several years ago when I heard that Nora had died; and I was struck, to my surprise, with a real sense of desolation last month when, on a visit to England, walking down that alley, I tried to figure out where the Diogenes Club had been, and looked first in the wrong place, then saw the faded green cloth awnings shading the windows of a tapas restaurant above a mobile phone shop, and, painted on them, a stylized man in a barrel. It seemed almost indecent, and it set me remembering.
There were no fireplaces in the Diogenes Club, and no armchairs either, but still, stories were told there.
Most of the people drinking there were men, although women passed through from time to time, and Nora had recently acquired a glamorous permanent fixture in the shape of a deputy, a blonde Polish emigre who called everybody “darlink” and who helped herself to drinks whenever she got behind the bar. When she got drunk, she would tell us that she was by rights a countess, back in Poland, and swear us all to secrecy.
There were actors and writers, or course. Film editors, broadcasters, police inspectors and drunks. People who did not keep fixed hours. People who stayed out too late, or who did not want to go home. Some nights there might be a dozen people there, or more. Other nights I’d wander in and I’d be the only person there – on those occasions I’d buy myself a single drink, drink it down, and then leave.
That night, it was raining, and there were four of us in the club after midnight.
Nora and her deputy were sitting up at the bar, working on their sitcom. It was about a chubby-but-cheerful woman who owned a drinking club, and her scatty deputy, an aristocratic foreign blonde who made amusing English mistakes. It would be like Cheers, Nora used to tell people. She named the comical Jewish landlord after me. Sometimes they would ask me to read a script.
The rest of us were sitting over by the window: an actor named Paul (commonly known as Paul-the-actor, to stop people confusing him with Paul-the-police-inspector or Paul-the-struck-off-plastic-surgeon, who were also regulars), a computer gaming magazine editor named Martyn, and me. We knew each other vaguely, and the three of us sat at a table by the window and watched the rain come down, misting and blurring the lights of the alley.
There was another man there, older by far than any of the three of us. He was ca
daverous, and grey-haired and painfully thin, and he sat alone in the corner and nursed a single whisky. The elbows of his tweed jacket were patched with brown leather, I remember that quite vividly. He did not talk to us, or read, or do anything. He just sat, looking out at the rain and the alley beneath, and, sometimes, he sipped his whisky without any visible pleasure.
It was almost midnight, and Paul and Martyn and I had started telling ghost stories. I had just finished telling them a sworn-true ghostly account from my school days: the tale of the Green Hand. It had been an article of faith at my prep school that there was a disembodied, luminous hand that was seen, from time to time, by unfortunate schoolboys. If you saw the Green Hand you would die soon after. Fortunately, none of us were ever unlucky enough to encounter it, but there were sad tales of boys there before our time, boys who saw the Green Hand and whose thirteen-year-old hair had turned white overnight. According to school legend they were taken to the sanatorium, where they would expire after a week or so without ever being able to utter another word.
“Hang on,” said Paul-the-actor. “If they never uttered another word, how did anyone know they’d seen the Green Hand? I mean, they could have seen anything.”
As a boy, being told the stories, I had not thought to ask this, and now it was pointed out to me it did seem somewhat problematic.
“Perhaps they wrote something down,” I suggested, a bit lamely.
We batted it about for a while, and agreed that the Green Hand was a most unsatisfactory sort of ghost. Then Paul told us a true story about a friend of his who had picked up a hitchhiker, and dropped her off at a place she said was her house, and when he went back the next morning, it turned out to be a cemetery. I mentioned that exactly the same thing had happened to a friend of mine as well. Martyn said that it had not only happened to a friend of his, but, because the hitchhiking girl looked so cold, the friend had lent her his coat, and the next morning, in the cemetery, he found his coat all neatly folded on her grave.
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 36